Thursday, May 14, 2009

CEiMB: Jerk Chicken with Cool Pineapple Salsa

As you can see I've joined the Craving Ellie in My Belly crew. Since all the cool kids are in the group, I wanted to join to (by cool kids I mean Pamela and Leslie and Cathy, to name a few). The food always looks good, and the reviews the same. Plus one can not live on desserts alone (as tempting as that may be). One of my goals is to do more cooking for myself, and to be mindful of what I eat (quality of ingredients, eating whole foods, not to mention quantity), so this seems to be just the thing to be "cool" and accomplish goals. During my stress shopping last week I added "The Food You Crave" to my Amazon cart. The book arrived on Monday and I've had some fun looking through it.

I must confess when I saw "Jerk Chicken" as the first recipe I thought about skipping it and waiting until next week to start. Anything super spicy, or medium spicy, or anything that even has a hint of spicy is too much for me. My dad, who I'm very much like in so many ways, could eat a jalapeno pepper whole and not even break a sweat. I break a sweat just looking at a jalapeno, let alone a scotch bonnet (which is ten million times hotter on the Scoville scale --okay, perhaps I exaggerate -- but not by much). I was going to try a bit of jalapeno, but ended up having everything else I needed at home, and simply did not want to stop at the store to buy one ingredient that I don't like very much.

One of the things I had were gigantic organic chicken breasts from Trader Joe's. They were large enough that I just pounded out one and cut it in half, and then halved the recipe to make two servings. This was tasty enough, and I really did like the salsa that goes with it, but I'm sure something was lost in the translation by leaving out the heat. Tasty, indeed, but okay.

I'm so looking forward to exploring this book. I definitely don't need another cook book, but I love the pictures, and the fresh ingredients, and the helpful hints inside. I think this will be fun. Plus I get to be in some pretty nice company.

Too bad I joined after Jen from Notes From the Table, who picked this week's recipe, headed to my home town. I could trade her a city tour or a ride to the Zoo for a taste of all those yummy treats she made for the trip. Oh well -- next time.